KWUR 90.3 FM Blog

Sunday, January 25, 2009

KWUR does slam poetry - "I am Socrates..."

"...with Plato pulling at my puppet strings. GET IN THE FUCKING CAVE!"-Aaron Samuels

KWUR audioservice joined forces with WU-Slam, WUSTL's slam poetry club, to bring their "Grand Slam" to the St. Louis community. Cats showed up from all places in all ages to see poets take the stage and compete for spots on the slam team headed for nationals. Everyone gathered in the Danforth University Center for this chill event. We will rebroadcast parts of the event over the air during safe-harbor hours. The full audio file is hueg (3 hours of audio), so I can't host it here unless I split it 10 times, so we'll keep you posted when its fully available. In the meantime, here are some pictures of the KWUR banner flying high taken with YASCOAP (Yet Another Shitty Camera On A Phone).

Improvised Tech booth above the stage (yeah we had set up backwards :P). We plugged into the house sound system and blasted Mos Def, Sage Francis, Haiku D'etat, !!!, and others (playlist below) for the staff and students alike. We also figured out and fixed the soundsystem problems since the university admins were having saturation issues with it. Three words: check your preamp! Good thing they had compressors...

Main event coming together

In progress with glorious lights and sound. Also, full house!

Needless to say, the slam was great success. Dave and I were surprised by the amount of non-fictional writing by the poets (at least 5 intensely personal verses). After the show, a bunch of people came up to us asking what we played. One dude named Focus (I shit you not, gentle reader) told us we blew his mind with our selection. I wish Focus had a picture of the Dilated Peoples poster he described to me. Mabye it looked something like this:

but wall sized? Who knows. Anyway, here's our playlist in no particular order: